OVERVIEW SĂPTĂMÂNAL

Lack of data openness often raises concerns about corruption, with the assumption that “closed” governments have something to hide. To determine whether the data affirm this, it is helpful to compare the Global Open Data Index with the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI; 174 countries). The CPI derives scores from an aggregation of various governance indices including the World Economic Forum, World Justice Project, World Bank, IMD, Freedom House, The Economist Intelligence Unit, African Development Bank, and others.

In 2015 the EU launched the world’s first international data portal, the Chinese government pledged to make state data public, and the UK lost its open data crown to Taiwan. Troves of data were unlocked by governments around the world last year, but the usefulness of much of that data is still to be determined by the civic groups, businesses and governments who use it. So what’s in the pipeline? And how will the open data ecosystem grow in 2016? We asked the experts.

An international group of researchers have reassessed the original findings after a long and protracted fight with the drug’s manufacturer to gain access to the original raw data. In a study published in the British Medical Journal, they argue that scientific data published all of those years ago, claiming the antidepressant was safe and effective, were manipulated to cast the drugs in a more favourable light.

Waco, Texas, became the fourth What Works City, and the fourth city in Texas, to pass an open data policy. In August 2015, the Waco City Council authorized a partnership with What Works Cities to advance the use of data and evidence in city hall, with Sunlight leading work on open data. As part of the overall effort that included the development of the open data policy, city staff are also beginning work on a preliminary data inventory and are identifying priority areas of focus for the data and information that will be released to Waco residents in open and machine-readable formats.